Firebrand

Phyllis Schlafly and the conservative revolution.

On October 12, 1971, the United States House of Representatives approved the Equal Rights Amendment by a vote of 354 to 23. Five months later, the same amendment was passed by the Senate by a margin very nearly as lopsided—84 to 8—at which point the E.R.A. was sent on to the states for ratification. Several legislatures vied to be the first to approve it. (So eager was the Delaware state senate that it voted to ratify an hour and forty minutes before the amendment had technically been submitted.) Typical was the debate in Topeka, which took approximately ten minutes. The E.R.A. was supported by Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, and actively lobbied for by the First Ladies Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter. The A.F.L.-C.I.O., the League of Women Voters, and the National Education Association backed it; women’s magazines ranging from Redbook and Good Housekeeping to Cosmopolitan ran scores of positive articles on it, and its many celebrity champions included Patty Duke, Ann Landers, Erma Bombeck, Marlo Thomas, and Carol Burnett, the last of whom once pleaded, “I have three daughters. Unless they’re protected by the Constitution, what’s going to happen to them?”

Meanwhile, sitting in her living room in suburban St. Louis, Phyllis Schlafly had decided that the E.R.A. was a bad idea. Schlafly had no real organization to speak of, just a monthly newsletter that she mailed to a few thousand supporters, and it was there that she laid out her case against the amendment. American women, she wrote in the Phyllis Schlafly Report, were blessed to live in a country where Christian traditions of chivalry still held—“a man’s first significant purchase (after a car) is a diamond for his bride”—and where free enterprise was continually improving life for the weaker sex. “The great heroes of women’s liberation are not the straggly haired women on television talk shows and picket lines,” she asserted, but “geniuses” like “Clarence Birdseye, who invented the process for freezing foods.” Why, Schlafly demanded, should women “lower” themselves to equal rights “when we already have the status of special privilege?” Leaders of the pro-E.R.A. campaign found it hard to take such arguments seriously: according to one contemporary account, copies of the Report became collectors’ items among feminists, acquired for their comic value.

The larger significance of events is, of course, often obscure to those busy living them out. Exactly what seemed most ridiculous about Schlafly in the early seventies—her antiquarian views, her screwball logic, her God’s-on-our-side self-confidence—was by the end of the decade revealed to be her political strength. First the ratification process for the E.R.A. slowed, then it stalled out entirely. The last state to approve the amendment was Indiana, in January, 1977. Meanwhile, five states that had already voted to ratify rescinded their approval, a move of uncertain legal force but of ominous implications. As it became clear that the E.R.A. was going down, the tone of the Schlafly jokes began to sour.

“I just don’t see why some people don’t hit Phyllis Schlafly in the mouth,” a well-known feminist lawyer, Florence Kennedy, told a Miami radio station.

“I’d like to burn you at the stake,” Betty Friedan blurted out during a debate with Schlafly in Bloomington, Illinois. “I consider you a traitor to your sex. I consider you an Aunt Tom.”

A new political biography, “Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade” (Princeton; $29.95), by Donald T. Critchlow, follows Schlafly from her birth to the present day—at eighty-one, she is still putting out the Report. Critchlow, a history professor at Saint Louis University, argues for the exemplarity of Schlafly’s life, which, he claims, parallels the rise of American conservatism.

Schlafly was born into a family that, demographically speaking, should have been Democrats. Her parents, Bruce and Odile Stewart, were middle-class Catholics from St. Louis. When the Depression hit, Bruce, a sales engineer, lost his job, and for the next ten years the family got by on what Odile could earn, first as a salesclerk and later as a librarian. Through it all, the Stewarts remained politically anti-New Deal and socially admiring of old money. Phyllis was sent to Junior League dance classes and enrolled in the Academy of the Sacred Heart, an élite Catholic school where grades for deportment were given in French. (For the details of Schlafly’s early life, Critchlow is heavily indebted to a popular biography, “The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority,” written by Carol Felsenthal in 1981.) To make the private-school tuition, Odile had to work seven days a week.

At Sacred Heart, Phyllis received top honors every quarter except for one, a lapse that, she noted mournfully in a scrapbook, could be attributed to “the absence caused by my having the measles.” Upon graduating, she received a full scholarship to a local Catholic college, but soon decided it wasn’t challenging enough and enrolled in Washington University, in St. Louis. Schlafly graduated in three years, Phi Beta Kappa, went on to earn a master’s degree in government from Radcliffe, and then worked for a year in Washington at the American Enterprise Association, the conservative think tank that later became the American Enterprise Institute. At twenty-five, she married Fred Schlafly, a lawyer fifteen years her senior. At twenty-six, she had her first child. (Five more followed.) The boy was not yet out of diapers when she decided to run for Congress.

The way Critchlow tells it, shortly after Christmas, 1951, the Schlaflys were visited by a group of local Republicans at odds with the Party establishment. (By this point, the family was living across the river from St. Louis, in Alton, Illinois.) The group wanted Fred to challenge the machine candidate for the Republican congressional nomination. Fred wasn’t interested—“I am not your guy,” he reportedly said—but his wife was. She threw herself into the campaign, firing off a barrage of daily press releases to the local papers, speaking before any group that would have her, and travelling from one end of the district to the other. Schlafly won the primary in an upset, and the morning after her victory she invited a photographer from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat into her kitchen, where she posed in a polka-dot apron, cooking eggs.

Schlafly’s district—Illinois’s Twenty-fourth—was heavily Democratic; her opponent, a five-term incumbent named Melvin Price, was a classically parochial congressman whose major interest was funnelling federal money back home. Breezily ignoring this fact, Schlafly portrayed him as a committed ideologue. When she wasn’t attacking Price for championing “big government and big spending” and coddling Communist sympathizers—“The New Deal party was extremely slow in realizing the dangers of Communism, but my opponent, Melvin Price, was even slower than most of his party”—she was accusing the Truman Administration of treason. The Administration, she declared, handed over atom-bomb ingredients to the “Reds,” passed around a drawing of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and practiced mind-control techniques copied from the Chinese. “Many government bureaus have developed extensive programs of brainwashing to push through socialized medicine and universal military training,” she announced. Price won, as expected, but by the end of the campaign he was so livid he refused even to shake her hand.

After the election, Schlafly returned to private life, or at least to her version of it. She and her husband shared an obsession with the Communist menace and took to entertaining friends with after-dinner showings of films like “Operation Abolition,” which portrayed students protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee as violence-prone radicals, and “Communism on the Map,” which showed red ink slowly spreading across the globe until just a few countries, including Switzerland and the United States, remained. In the late fifties, they helped found a group, the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, whose goal was to organize Catholics to resist the threat. “The plain facts are that Communism is advancing over the surface of the globe with such rapidity that if it continues at the same rate for the next thirteen years that it has been advancing during the past thirteen years, America will be Communist by 1970,” Schlafly predicted.

Schlafly’s views soon brought her into conflict with her own party. In 1958, as a prelude to opening negotiations with the U.S.S.R. on a nuclear-test-ban treaty, President Eisenhower proposed a one-year testing moratorium. The move, Schlafly wrote, was clearly “a victory for appeasement-minded politicians,” for an agreement with the Soviets “will not stop Red aggression any more than disarming our local police will stop murder, theft, and rape.” The following year, she compiled a reading list, “Inside the Communist Conspiracy,” designed to counter what she called an “American failure to grasp the fact that we are already engaged in a total war with the Communists.” The Soviets’ talk about “peaceful coexistence,” she said, really meant that “they will take a peaceful gun, containing a peaceful bullet, and kill you peacefully.”

When Eisenhower’s Vice-President, Richard Nixon, won the 1960 Republican Presidential nomination, Schlafly was unenthusiastic. Her favored candidate was Senator Barry Goldwater, of Arizona, and to help him secure the 1964 nomination she composed a pocket-sized book titled “A Choice Not an Echo.” (The title was taken from a phrase Goldwater had used in announcing his candidacy.) In inimitable Schlafly style, “A Choice Not an Echo” mixed fact, sensational accusations, commonsensical truths, and elaborate conspiracy theories into a compelling but evidently bogus narrative. The book purported to explain how Republican “kingmakers” had wheeled and dealed and, when necessary, bribed their way through every Convention from 1936 to 1960 in order to secure the nomination for a man who would faithfully carry out their “America Last” vision of foreign policy. (Why exactly the kingmakers were intent on undermining the United States was never specified.)

“The kingmakers have a vested interest in preventing—at all cost—the nomination of a candidate, such as Barry Goldwater, who will let the Soviet system collapse of its own internal weaknesses,” Schlafly warned. It was up to “grassroots Republicans” to stop this nefarious scheme. Schlafly published the book at her own expense in April, 1964, and began mailing it out, gratis, to friends and fellow anti-Communist activists. Soon the orders started pouring in. Within a month, the book had supposedly sold more than half a million copies, and, within six months, more than three million.

To a remarkable extent, “A Choice Not an Echo” fulfilled Schlafly’s goal. Ninety-three per cent of the delegates to the 1964 Republican Convention reported having read it, and twenty-six per cent said that they had been influenced by it. “A Choice Not an Echo” had heralded the Arizona senator as “the one Republican candidate on the horizon who can and will win.” Nevertheless, in November, when Goldwater was trounced by Lyndon Johnson, Schlafly brushed aside suggestions that she was in any way to blame for the rout. Responsibility for the defeat, she insisted, lay with the liberal wing of the Party, which had refused to abide by the “grassroots” choice: “Like spoiled children, they took their marbles and went home.”

According to her first biographer, Carol Felsenthal, it wasn’t until the Equal Rights Amendment had already passed the House that Schlafly decided she was against it. She launched her crusade, STOP ERA, in the fall of 1972, and by the following spring the amendment had won thirty of the necessary thirty-eight state ratifications. Still, Schlafly was confident. “I knew from the start that I had found enough seriously wrong with E.R.A. to stop it, or at least stall it, for an awfully long time,” she would later say.

STOP ERA—the acronym stood for Stop Taking Our Privileges—initially drew its support from the same network of conservative women who had helped Schlafly distribute “A Choice Not an Echo.” Soon the movement began to grow, according to Critchlow, mainly by involving young women—a large proportion of them Evangelical Christians—who had never before been involved in politics. (When the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade, in January, 1973, the battle over the E.R.A. quickly became entangled with the fight over abortion rights.) In surveys, a remarkable ninety-eight per cent of E.R.A. opponents claimed church membership, as compared with thirty-one per cent of E.R.A. supporters.

Schlafly served as the public face of STOP ERA and, just as significant, as the behind-the-scenes strategist. She organized “training conferences” where she instructed her followers on how to hold press conferences, run phone banks, and infiltrate pro-E.R.A. organizations. She advised STOP ERA members on everything from the best way to hold a fund-raiser—give a brunch, avoid serving alcohol—to the proper attire for a TV appearance: “Always wear a scarf around your neck even if you have a short neck.” Schlafly herself was unfailingly well groomed and cheerful, even when taunting her opponents. One of her favorite tactics was to upstage pro-E.R.A. forces at their own rallies. Another was to perform satirical ditties, like this one, written shortly after Playboy donated five thousand dollars to a pro-E.R.A. group:

Here comes Playboy cottontail

Hopping down the bunny trail,

Trying to buy votes for E.R.A.

Telling every girl and boy,

You can only have your joy,

By becoming gender-free or gay.

“First of all, I want to thank my husband, Fred, for letting me come,” Schlafly announced at a rally in Houston. “I always like to say that, because it makes the libs so mad.”

Schlafly once said that the pro-E.R.A. movement had “sealed its own doom,” and to a certain extent she was right. Feminist groups had fought off efforts to add a provision to the amendment that would have exempted women from the draft. Though it was unclear whether passage of the E.R.A. would have meant women could be sent into combat, advocates found themselves arguing that this would be a desirable outcome. (When Alan Alda, a vocal E.R.A. proponent, was asked whether he would support his daughters’ being drafted, he answered emphatically “Yes,” only to add that his daughters would be conscientious objectors.) Meanwhile, as the ratification battle dragged on, the nation’s most prominent pro-E.R.A. group, the National Organization for Women, became increasingly associated with radical feminist politics. In a 1977 book, “The Power of the Positive Woman,” Schlafly reprinted in its entirety one of the organization’s pamphlets, “Revolution: Tomorrow Is NOW,” which proposed, among other things, “an end to militarism, narcissism and sexually stereotyped advertising” for children’s toys and a public veil-burning to “protest the second class status of women in all churches.”

E.R.A. supporters tried at every opportunity to point out the inconsistency of Schlafly’s position. Here was a woman who insisted that a woman’s greatest satisfaction lay in caring for her family—in 1973, Schlafly still had four children at home—yet spent most of her time politicking. (In the middle of the STOP ERA campaign, Schlafly stunned everyone, including her husband, by announcing that, on top of everything else, she was going to start law school; she received her law degree a few years later.) But Schlafly’s personal life could just as easily be taken as proof of what she was arguing: that women had no need for the E.R.A.

“I think what Phyllis is doing is absolutely dreadful,” Karen DeCrow, who was the president of NOW in the mid-seventies, once said. “But I just can’t think of anyone who’s so together and tough. I mean, everything you should raise your daughter to be. . . . She’s an extremely liberated woman.”

Accounts of the resurgence of the right tend to come in one of two varieties. There are the sort that credit think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and intellectuals like Friedrich Hayek and Leo Strauss with rehabilitating conservative ideas. And then there are those which construe the right’s triumph as a more haphazard affair—the result of alliances made primarily for pragmatic reasons. By this latter account, it isn’t the coherence of conservative ideology that matters but just the opposite—the movement was so loosely conceived that it could accommodate libertarians and religious fundamentalists, pro-gun lobbyists and pro-lifers.

“Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism” takes the second approach, and it’s easy to see why. Schlafly’s defeat of the E.R.A. may have been a victory for the right, but it clearly didn’t follow from a lot of intellectual heavy-lifting. (By Schlafly’s own reckoning, her sex precluded this: women, she once wrote, “don’t take naturally to a search for the intangible and the abstract.”) In the nineteen-sixties, the enemy was Khrushchev; in the seventies, it was Carol Burnett. Schlafly never really explained this turn in her political life, and she didn’t seem to feel that any explanation was required.

But while she may not have been consistent in her choice of targets, Schlafly was unwavering in her characterization of them. Starting with Melvin Price, back in 1952, her opponents have invariably been not just wrong or misguided but downright evil. From the Communists and “perverts” who infiltrated the State Department to the Republican kingmakers, who used “hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques,” and the “women’s libbers,” who placed “their agents and sympathizers in the media and the educational system,” Schlafly’s foes have always aimed at nothing less than the destruction of “civilization as we know it.” Anyone who failed to see this just didn’t understand how the world really works. (On the long, long list of those whom Schlafly charged with colluding in the “preemptive surrender” of the United States to the Soviets were Robert McNamara, Paul Nitze, and Henry Kissinger.) Whether Schlafly’s paranoia represents actual delusion or just a rhetorical posture is hard to say. Even at its most despairing, her writing has a gleefulness that makes the reader feel she’s having fun.

One consequence—quite possibly intentional—of Schlafly’s accusations has been to induce in her antagonists a kind of like-minded hysteria. They have, over the years, charged Schlafly with everything from racism to child neglect, and have suggested, with surprising frequency, that her premature death would not be unwelcome. “If Phyllis Schlafly walked into the headlights of my car, I would knock her into the next time zone,” one E.R.A. activist announced on national TV. In the end, Schlafly’s denunciatory tone, more than any of her actual campaigns, probably represents her most lasting contribution to American life. While Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham were still playing tea party, she recognized that deliberation was no match for diatribe, and logic no equal to contempt. She was, in this way, a woman ahead of her time. ♦

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